Working days in South Korea in 2031

How working days in South Korea are counted in 2031

The 244 working days shown above are the 365 calendar days of 2031, minus the 104 Saturdays and Sundays, minus the 17 public holidays that land on a weekday. Holidays that fall on a Saturday or Sunday are not subtracted, because they do not remove a day anyone would have worked; in 2031 that applies to 0 of South Korea's public holidays. At a standard eight-hour day, 244 working days works out to roughly 1,952 working hours across the year, before any annual leave is taken.

What counts as a working day in South Korea

Korean Labour Standards Act article 50 sets a 40-hour, five-day working week with a 52-hour cap including overtime since 2018. The standard private-sector week is Monday to Friday with banks operating Monday to Friday. The Civil Procedure Act article 170 rolls statutory deadlines falling on a Sunday or public holiday to the next working day; Saturdays are also excluded by 2003 amendment. Settlement of Korean won transactions runs on the Bank of Korea's BOK-Wire+ high-value system, which observes the full fifteen-day public holiday list, and on the Korea Financial Telecommunications and Clearings Institute's domestic systems.

South Korea observes fifteen designated public holidays under the Act on Public Holidays for Public Institutions, expanded in 2021 to apply the same calendar to private workplaces with five or more employees. The list mixes civic dates (Independence Movement Day on 1 March, Liberation Day on 15 August, National Foundation Day on 3 October, Hangul Day on 9 October) with lunar holidays (Seollal Korean New Year and Chuseok harvest festival, each three days) and Buddha's Birthday by the lunar calendar. The substitute holiday system introduced in 2014 and broadened in 2021 grants a make-up weekday whenever Seollal, Chuseok or several other holidays fall on a Sunday or Saturday.

This matters because the working-day total is not spread evenly. Some months in South Korea carry several public holidays while others have none, so the month-by-month table above is the figure to use for payroll runs, billing cycles, SLA windows, and project plans rather than a flat assumption of about 20.3 working days per month. A month with two weekday holidays can have several fewer working days than a clear one, which changes capacity planning and the realistic delivery date for anything scheduled in business days.

To see the individual dates, the day of the week each holiday lands on, and the full official list, open the South Korea holiday calendar for 2031. You can subscribe to those dates as an .ics feed so they appear in your own calendar, or use the working-days-between-two-dates calculator to count business days for a specific date range rather than the whole year.

Working-day figures are computed from the public holiday list for South Korea (source: Nager.Date and the national references above) combined with a Monday-to-Friday business week. Regional holidays and substitute-day rules vary; confirm against the official calendar for legal or payroll use.